


Heart-Searching On Corellia

by sira365



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Jedi Apprentice Series - Jude Watson & Dave Wolverton
Genre: Aftermath, Being Lost, Character Study, Clone Wars, Coronet City, Flashbacks, Introspection, Jedi, Loneliness, Non-Graphic Violence, Not Canon Compliant, On the Run, Planet Corellia (Star Wars), Post-Order 66 (Star Wars), Self-Discovery, Space Pirates, Strong Female Characters, Sunsets, Undercover, Walking, strange metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27416437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sira365/pseuds/sira365
Summary: After the events of Order 66, Siri Tachi is on the run from the Empire. Alone, conflicted, and disoriented, she finds herself back on her home planet of Corellia. And what better place can there be for soul-searching than from where her story begins?
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	Heart-Searching On Corellia

**Author's Note:**

> So, if you've read my other works, you'll certainly see that I have a tendency to write crack. This is me trying (and probably failing) to adopt a more serious tone in my storytelling, and um, well... you'll be the judge of how it went. 
> 
> Mild warning, there's a bit of swearing, non-graphic descriptions of violence, and presence of slavery in the flashback scenes.
> 
> Reviews would be much appreciated. :)

Looking out of the window, Siri saw the planet orbit into view. White strands swirled on top of its blue surface. She knew she would have come across it some day, but never imagined it to be under these circumstances.

_“So, Zora, where you from?” He sat cross-legged across her on a leather couch, twisting a handle of a silver knife, the tip of its blade balanced on his index finger._

_“Coruscant.” Curt replies were what kept you alive in this business._

_The man stood up slowly from his seat and treaded lazily towards her._

_“Cute answer dearie. But no one’s from Coruscant. Where are you really from?” he leaned in, lightly pressing the blade into her side._

_The cynic in her laughed at the predicament she was in. She wasn’t lying to him. She really was from Coruscant. Maybe she wasn’t born there, but it was where she grew up and what she called home._

_The best covers were always rooted in half-truths._

_“Corellia.”_

_He stepped back, donning a self-satisfied smile._

Corellia. 

She never knew how to feel about the planet. Was it longing? Ambivalence? Or nothing? 

Her creschemaster said she was a month old when she was taken to the temple from a dingy apartment on the outskirts of Coronet City. She was removed from a life of dilapidated building complexes and wavering fluorescent lights, and brought to the grand, pristine Jedi Temple in the scintillating capital of the galaxy. 

“This is Corellia Air Space Control. Freighter, please identify yourself.” a static voice spoke into her communications.

“This is K-768, bringing in a shipment from Alderaan.” 

“Understood. Land on Airstrip 5.” 

“Roger that.”

She’d hopped from planet to planet for the last few months, evading the relentless persecution by Imperial agents, unwillingly stuck in a game of cat and mouse. Wrapping herself in the guise of a freighter pilot, she delivered shipments as they delivered her a few more months of safety as a random nobody on yet another planet. 

The universe was too big to be warm, but this cold, darkness was exactly what Siri needed to be just another face in the crowd. She cursed and thanked the freezing void that was the galaxy. 

She landed her spacecraft on the air strip. 

After all these years, she was back on Corellia, and she knew as much about it as the day she left - nothing, and no one. 

Siri stepped out of the freighter, taking in a breath of Corellian air, a hint of fuel amidst a cool breeze. She thought her first few moments on Corellia’s solid ground would leave more of an impact on her. They did not 

“Ya going out to the city, lass?” The man unloading her cargo asked.

“I guess.” 

“Just catch the train right outside. It’ll take ya straight out to Coronet.” In his orange overalls, he waved his hand towards a concrete building.

“Thank you.”

* * *

If the winds of destiny had blown the other way on that fateful day, she could have been any one of these people on this bustling street that lay between grey columns and neon lights. Maybe she’d be that vendor selling cheap compasses around the corner, or among the group of laughing, spirited women walking towards her. 

Maybe she wouldn’t have known such pain.

All the trials and tribulations, the heartaches and heartbreaks. The prestige of the Jedi Order was admirable to many, but few knew what holding that status truly entailed.

Chasing after bounty hunters and slavers, dealing with sleazy politicians and all the other scummy lowlifes the galaxy had to offer was alluring on paper, but the reality was far from that. Undercover missions had left her dismayed by the collusion, dejected by the corruption, and despaired by the suffering she had to witness, and worst of all, create. 

_She took in her surroundings. Dirty lights and gritty music, a staple set-up in seedy bars to distract one from the ongoing debauchery. It wasn't quite loud enough for her._

_“Zora, you’re the fucking shit!” A crewmate juggling a glass of ale slapped her on the back. She forced out a smug smile._

_“You’re good, but don’t let it go to your head.” He drawled, seemingly out of nowhere._

_She didn’t know he had shown up already._

_“Krayn.” She turned around to face him. She kept up her façade of calm coolness, suppressing the searing guilt in her conscience. The guards’ faces flashed across her mind, the horror in their eyes forever burnt into her brain. They didn’t have to die. They shouldn’t have to die._

_“Get some rest, doll. I need ya ready to roll again tomorrow.”_

_She didn’t want to know why._

_“We're breaking in some slaves. You’re gonna love it.” He smirked at her, raking his fingers through her hair._

If there was one constant in her life right now, it was the screams and cries that had burrowed into her head, a worm crawling through her being with no intention of stopping. She closed her eyes and paused in the middle of the street, trying to push away all the regret. She wasn’t going to fool herself, no amount of repentance would ever help her exchange the wails and terror that engulfed her nights with peace, not even for one second. She would be grateful if she could just have somber silence. She took a deep breath and reopened her eyes, a flickering sign of a scrappy motel came into sight, lit white and cool. She scanned the rates. She’d be able to afford a room for the next week with what she had on her, but she’d have to find an odd job soon if she planned on staying any longer. 

* * *

Back lying flat on the white sheets of her sterile motel room, Siri stared up at a darkened patch in the middle of the cream ceiling. The mould was like a dirt hole dug in the perfect, green pastures of Naboo, a fallen spacecraft adrift on stormy Kaminoan seas. And amidst her idle dwellings, she fancied the metaphor of her being the mildew, unwanted and unwelcome.

Yet, the damn fungi was everywhere. She’d seen it all over empty ceilings and unsuspecting corners. From the deep Core to the Outer Rim, from the dry deserts of Tatooine to the dripping forests of Kashyyyk, she had yet to find a motel room free of its presence. Siri could scorn it for its pestilence, but its resilience was diabolical, and one could never fault brilliance. Mould could claim any nook of the universe as its own and make it its home, and wasn’t that what she needed right now?

Maybe she had an eye for literature after all, unlike what her Basic Literature teacher had claimed.

She’d hold on to the past that made her, to the people who inspired her, to the faith that guided her. She’d never let them go, but she still had to grow, like the must on the ceiling. 

To grow, one must build your way up from the bottom, and Siri Tachi just so happened to be where her story began, on Corellia. 

* * *

The Corellia Public Records Office was on the east side of Coronet City. 

Siri walked into the building and stood under a glass rotunda. Soft light reflected off the compass carved into the marble floor. She searched the directory, and found what she was looking for on the third level - birth records.

She strolled up to a silver terminal. Early in the morning still, it hadn’t been turned on yet. She pulled out the attached chair, and sat down, sinking to eye level with the black monitor. She reached out to press a button on the side of the unit. The screen came to life, and a rectangular, white search bar popped up in front of her. 

Siri glanced down at the keyboard, her fingers hovering hesitantly above the keys. Slowly, she typed ‘Siri Tachi’ into the search bar, tapping the letter keys like a youngling would, one by one with an unsure index finger. 

_4,834,583 matches (last 50 years)_

Tachi might not be a common surname, but in a galaxy filled with a hundred quadrillion sentients, the unordinary come in millions. The large number of results were not discouraging to Siri. Trained as a Jedi Shadow, she knew her databases well. She adjusted her search to include those born on the same day as her.

_96 matches._

She narrowed down the field further to just include females born in Coronet City.

_12 matches._

Siri transferred the information onto her datapad, and skimmed through the addresses while cross-referencing a map of the city. All she had to go on was that her biological family lived in a shabby building on the outskirts. 

_Flat 5D, Building A47, 543 West, District 57, Coronet City._

Her heart skipped a beat. She looked at the map. It fit the description the most, the rest just matched up with central urban areas.

Pulling up a hologram of the area, she saw a twenty-storey, grey-tiled building. The exterior looked like it had recently undergone some repairs. It was about two hours out from her current location, if she left now, she’d make it there by noon.

Though she felt pretty confident that she hadn’t raised any suspicions among the local authorities, not leaving behind a data trail would be a wise course of action. She looked around before clearing her search from the terminal’s history. It wasn’t the first time she’d circumvented security walls, and it probably wasn’t going to be the last. 

Pushing the steel chair back into the desk, she hurried out of the archive to the nearest transport. She didn’t know what she was going to find, but she was open to new possibilities.

* * *

The airbus pulled into Air Route 52, joining the moving lanes of vehicles above the city. Peering out of a grimy window, Siri saw the towers and buildings whizzing past beneath her, the ashen concrete and gunmetal rooftops melting into one blurry mixture in her vision as the bus sped along. 

"Next stop, District 57." The automated system announced with an enthusiasm one could hardly relate to. 

District 57 was one of the residential districts of Coronet City. ‘Muted’ was the word that came to Siri's mind when she hopped off the bus and took in her surroundings. 

The buildings would have been considered modern if you looked at them fifty years ago. Giant numbers on their sides showed that they were part of a government housing project. A layer of tainted grey covered the towers. 

Siri walked past some children huddled on the floor playing with toy clone troopers. _'Stormtroopers.'_ She corrected herself, for as quickly as the Republic had adopted the clones for battle, the Empire had been even more eager to phase them out. 

She saw the characters _A47_ printed out bold and black on the sidewall of a building a couple hundred meters away from her. 

The thump in her chest grew with every step she took in the building’s direction. In all her years as a Shadow, she never took a job unprepared. She knew what words to utter and what threats to whisper to get her to where she needed to be, but now, she was two-thirds of the way to her destination and she still had no clue what she would say the moment the door to apartment 5D opens.

And when the door does open, and she is greeted by a human face, what then? A parent? A sibling? A relative? What did that even mean to Siri? Biological ties held no weight to the Jedi. To Siri, the Force was her home, the sentients of the universe her brothers and sisters, bonded together by compassion. 

In a lift carrying her up to the fifth floor, she wondered if she was doing the right thing. Was this her trying to find a genuine connection in her time of abandonment, or was she compensating for something she felt she had lost? What was she trying to achieve? The elevator did not wait for her to finish mulling over her lamentations, its stainless steel doors slid open, the whir of moving metal breaking Siri from her thoughts. She took a step into a tiled hallway. Not for the first time, she was past the point of no return.

_The smell of burnt flesh hit her. As he went in for another strike, she had to look away, hiding her humanity in feigned distraction. Cruel laughter drowned out the suffered cries, but she heard the anguished scream loud and clear._

_“Have a go Zora, tough guy needs a lesson.” He sneered at the crumpled form lying on the ground, extending an electric whip to her._

_She looked up to meet his eyes. She wouldn’t show it, but behind her apathetic gaze was burning contempt and undiluted disgust. Where had such barbaric sadism been born?_

_“Zora.” He pressed the device into her hand, impatient and confused._

_If she blew her cover now, all of this would be for naught. She wanted nothing more than to free the captured from their shackles and take down Krayn. She’d win the battle, but lose the war. They needed to lock up this sick, twisted man for good, as well as his equally unscrupulous cronies and associates, and they needed cold, hard evidence to do that, proof they could only obtain by her doing her job, and right now, at this instant, torture was her charge._

_She chose her words. She knew they would be despicable. “It would be my pleasure, Krayn.”_

_Her fingers tightened their grip on the hold, knuckles whitening. Her thumb trembled above the trigger. Swallowing her creed, she pushed the button._

_The electric hum and snap of the whip echoed through the room as it powered up._

_She took in the lying form of the man on the floor. He stared at her, defiant and unshrinking. She willed herself to look at him, not just to keep up her act, but to immortalize him in her memory._

_She would never forgive herself._

Doors painted a dull green lined the corridor, a nose-stinging scent of bleach hung in the air, taking her back to the hallways of the Temple after the cleaning bots had mopped the floor. Images of running along immaculate marble floors with friends and bumping into unamused Jedi Masters when they failed to slow down in time flooded her mind. She tried picturing her seven-year-old self roaming the straight passages of an apartment complex, and gathering with neighboring children on a brick podium. 

_5A, 5B, 5C...5D._

Stenciled letters at the centre of the door marked her purpose. Siri stared at them for a few moments, letting the feelings of her surroundings sink in. Raising a heavy arm, she gathered up the courage to knock. 

She heard some shuffling from behind the door, then the deafening clang of someone disengaging a locking mechanism. Waiting for a door to open had never felt so long. 

A sharp creak sounded out to reveal a heedful frame. Cautious eyes looked Siri up and down. 

“We’re not interested in buying anything.” The young woman began to close the door.

“No, wait! Please!” Siri wedged her foot into the gap between the door and the frame.

The young woman’s eyes widened, slightly frightened by the stranger’s forward actions. 

Siri gulped, preparing herself for what she was about to say. “I’m, I’m looking for a mister or missus Tachi. I believe they live here?” 

Something in Siri's voice got through to the woman as she opened up the door wider and relaxed her posture.

“I’m afraid you have the wrong address. There aren’t any Tachis here anymore.” she kindly said.

Siri dropped her gaze, but then lifted it again, “Anymore?” 

“The last family that lived here were called Tachi, I think. I’m afraid I don’t know where they moved to.” The young woman replied. 

The pang of a crushed expectation she didn’t know she held reverberated in her heart. 

“I see. Thank you for your time. My apologies for bothering you.” Siri hoped she didn’t sound let down. What did she have to be disappointed over in the first place? She was a Jedi. A Jedi does not fear, a Jedi has no attachments. She had the Force and that was enough. But underneath her discipline and faith, a notion lingered. Maybe, maybe she was the only Jedi left. She didn’t know whether the others had survived Order 66; She knew who she had lost to the war, fellow Knights, her close friends, her Master; She knew she was alone. 

Siri turned away from the apartment and headed to the elevators.

“I hope you find whoever you’re looking for.” The young woman called down the corridor.

Siri turned her head to the woman to acknowledge her, sending her a silent nod of thanks. The young woman gave her a small smile before returning to her home, closing her door with a gentle thud. 

The elevator pinged and Siri moved in. She watched the number displayed above the lift doors go down.

Reaching the ground floor, she exited the lift lobby back into a courtyard, the rays of the sun hitting her eyes. 

The children that had been playing in the middle of the podium were gone, a pile of leaves, that had been a part of their fun, the only indicator they had been there. 

Gulping down a hint of emotion she couldn't quite place, she walked through the empty courtyard. She did not know where she would go next. 

* * *

It was unlike Siri to not have an objective in mind, but today, she wandered the uniform streets. Corellia's sidewalks were well-maintained, yet the pavement felt unreliable, like it would crumble at any given moment. 

She had always been good at directions. Siri was no stranger to navigating enemy compounds or rough terrain. Making her way through Coruscant's maze-like lower levels had just been a minor inconvenience. Coronet City's centre lay east, so eastward she went. Even with this idea of direction, she couldn't shake off the sense that, for the first time in her life, she felt... _disoriented._

In her aimlessness, her footsteps brought her uphill to a clearing overlooking the cityscape. A single bench stood in the middle of the lookout. The sitting area came out of nowhere, its simplicity a sharp incongruence with the frenzied metropolis. It was oddly calming. 

The Clone Wars had taught her to never waste a moment of peace, so she willed herself to take a seat, surrounding herself with everything, and nothing. 

The sky was tinted orange, a sanguine haze glowing off stray strands of clouds, marking the end of another day. Night would soon fall over the millions of lifeforms that called this city home. 

The sunset used to be a sweet bow tied on top of a day well spent. Now on the run, it was but a sour reminder that she'd have to be on the move again soon. She was alive, but she wasn't living. At this point, she questioned why she bothered jumping from system to system. She was getting tired, and she felt the exhaustion run deep into her bones, and even deeper into the crevices of her mind. 

Siri surmised that the fatigue took root in her during the Clone Wars. The endless battle and the constant sounds of artillery bled into each other as the months went by and the war dragged on. Their valor and loyalty ultimately wasted on what culminated into elaborate betrayal and calculated slaughter. They should have seen it coming. 

A saturated crimson drowned the sky. It was funny how sunsets looked the same wherever she went, in the Temple, on pirate ships, on battlefields. The sun still set when dirt stained red; The sun still set when the Republic fell; The sun still set the day she lost everything. 

No matter what happened in the galaxy, she was there to watch the sunset every single time. Through it all, she stood. Siri Tachi was not infallible, but she was persistent. Call it vain pride or impertinent stubbornness, she knew to her core, that she was not one to give up a fight. 

She could not deny that she was growing weary, but the fire in her hadn’t gone out yet. This wasn’t going to be her last sunset, and tomorrow’s wouldn’t be either.

As long as the sun kept rising and setting, there was still hope. 

One of the last Jedi, she would keep going. She had a lot to live for. To keep the memory of her friends alive, to make up for what she had done. She’d overheard from whispers on the road that a rebel alliance was forming. She was determined she’d find an outpost and join the resistance. 

She was alone, drained, and adrift, but she’d carry on, like she always did.

A new path was ahead of her, and Siri Tachi was ready to run.

**Author's Note:**

> Siri Tachi is one of my favorite female characters in Star Wars, and I really wanted to write something that centered around her and her alone. Corellia being her home planet is 100% not canon, but the planet's known for its intrepid explorers and spunky individuals (cough*Hans Solo*cough), so it felt like a good fit. I wanted to show her feeling lost, trying to find a sense of direction, even a completely foreign and unimaginable one, in the aftermath of Order 66, and then rediscovering her will and purpose. Through the flashbacks, I tried to showcase the trauma she went through undercover. Despite everything, Siri Tachi still prevails and finds her bearings, and so can we. 
> 
> I definitely did not successfully capture all the dimensions of her character, but I hope I was able to convey her determination and strength. I'm going through a pretty stressful and significant phase of my life at the moment, and I desperately need to channel more of Siri's spirit in myself right now.


End file.
